Are you "black enough"?/ Voce é "suficientemente negra"?

Black folk never cease to amaze me. What do negros want? When Barack Obama announced that he intended to run for the presidency of the United States, black folk initially didn’t take him seriously. No one really believed Obama had a legitimate chance at the highest office in the United States, and some would argue the world. But as his popularity rose and the possibility of the first black American president became conceivable, black Americans began to question if that was actually true. As the Clinton Family (Bill and Hillary) and the media began to portray him as the “black candidate”, African-Americans accused him of not being “black enough”. What?!? Not “black enough”?!? Some argued that because Obama had a white mother that he was actually “mixed” and not actually black. Others argued that because he didn’t follow the “what about black people” style of racial politics as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan, he wasn’t “really black”. Reality alert. There is no single way of being black. Black people have long fought to overcome racist stereotypes in which all black people talked, danced, walked, sang alike and listened to the same type of music. Now, black people fight to hold on to stereotypes and label people who don’t conform to a certain type of blackness as “not black enough”.

African-Americans have also accused other blacks of not being “black enough”. Haitian-American journalist Marjorie Valbrun wrote about the anger she felt when African-Americans would challenge her blackness. I remember in 1998 when a girlfriend wanted baseball player Sammy Sosa to win his home run battle with Mark McGuire because he was a “brother” until she heard him speak with his Spanish accent at which point he became simply, a “foreigner”. Sosa is from the Dominican Republic. A friend recently spoke about a conversation he had had with his sister about black people in Latin America in which she replied, “But they are not black like us.” Reality alert 2. Of all the African slaves sent to the Americas 400-500 years ago, only 4% were sent to the United States. 96% were sent to South America and the Caribbean. In fact, 38% of all slaves were sent to Brazil, the largest recipient of African slaves. People should remember this when they see sports legends such as Pelé, who is from Brazil, Roberto Clemente, who was from Puerto Rico, actresses Garcelle Beauvais and Lela Rochon, both of Haitian descent and singer Celia Cruz of Cuba.

Recently, a writer named Marian Douglas-Ungaro rejected the idea that if Barack Obama became president he should be called the first African-American president of the United States because he is not a descendent of slaves sent to the United States. My question is this: how many divisions will we ultimately create in order to divide our people? Barack Obama was born in an American state. His father was Kenyan and his mother was an American. It appears to me that Obama has more right to the term “African-American” than those of us of consider ourselves African-Americans. “Race” is based on discrimination, exclusion and privilege. If someone discriminated against Obama because he is black does Douglas-Ungaro believe this treatment would be different if the father of Obama looked exactly the same but he had been born in the United States? Douglas-Ungaro also argues that Obama does not share black American ethnicity. Yet there are millions of African-Americans who don’t speak slang, listen to Jay-Z, and didn’t grow up in the ‘hood, do we exclude them from our African-American family also? I remember people questioning my blackness because I attended Catholic schools, but I have a profound interest in Black History and bridging this gap between African-Americans and Afro-Latinos. My experience of being black in the United States is not exactly the same as that of Marian Douglas-Ungaro but that does not make me “less black”. Black identity in Columbia, Brazil, Peru and Equador is not exactly the same as black identity in the United States. In truth, there are many differences between descendents of Africa in the Diaspora. But they are still our people. It is for this reason that I was proud to see Usain Bolt of Jamaica easily win the 200 meter race in the 2008 Olympics. Although his family was sent to Jamaica and mine to the United States, in the eyes of the world, he is a black man, just like me.